Improving Service Delivery with Work Order Management

Aardgas Service North (ASN), a subsidiary of ENECO Energie, provides services to over 25.000 customers in the indoor climate control industry. In such an increasingly competitive market, service levels are key for maintaining a leadership position.

Customer expectations grow with the rise of new operators and ASN is committed to meet these demands by continuously improving the services rendered to its nationwide customer base.
To maintain its competitive edge, ASN wanted to streamline the service related processes in order to optimize resources, reduce the response time and ultimately improve the overall service quality. To achieve these objectives, ASN was looking for a solution to ensure information alignment across the organization, provide real-time access to office and field users, replace manual and paper based processes, and centralize all information that was already available in other systems.

The Solution

After careful evaluation of existing alternatives, ASN selected the OutSystems Work Order Management (WOM) solution, which provides a wide set of functionalities to manage the entire service delivery process:

• Service Management : Call center employees register service requests online, ensuring that all customer interactions are centralized and fully traceable. It is always possible to know when a service was requested and follow-up on its resolution flow;
• Integrated Planning: The information regarding pending service requests is made available to the planning department, who has access to each field engineer's assignment schedule and is able to optimize resource allocation;
• Mobile Notifications: Field engineers receive notifications of their new assignments in real-time via PDA devices. This ensure that engineers are always aware of all service requests they have been assigned to, even when they are not in the office;
• Remote Access: When delivering the service, field engineers can access the system through their PDA and register their actions. By scanning the barcodes of materials and replacement parts that they use, the WOM solution will immediately calculate the
  total cost of the service to be used for invoicing purposes;
• Invoicing Support: The solution integrates with ASN's financial system and allows for invoices to be issued and printed on site by the engineer, and immediately handed to the customer. This level of automation has substantially reduced the administrative
  work for both the field teams and the financial department, and has accelerated the receivables process;
• Stock Management: The WOM solution manages the stock levels of all parts and materials used by the field teams, who carry a minimum stock of these items in their vehicles. When spare parts are used, engineers scan their barcodes and the solution automatically triggers a replenishment order to the back-office logistics system;
• Offline Support: The solution offers offline capabilities to ensure field engineers can use the system when the mobile network in unavailable and later on, synchronize their PDA with the central systems, ensuring a permanent information alignment. The WOM solution was deployed in collaboration with ViaData, an OutSystems Certified Partner.

The OutSystems Advantages

The WOM Solution was created and deployed using the OutSystems Platform, taking full advantage of its technological capabilities to:

• Integrate Multiple Systems: The integration capabilities and native support for Web Services facilitated the integration with both internal and external systems. As a result, the solution support the whole service delivery process, from service request to stock management and invoicing.
• Extend Enterprise Applications to the Entire Company: The out-of-the-box support for mobile interfaces provides field teams with access to the system anywhere and anytime, ensuring a constant information alignment across the company.
• Adapt to Specific User Needs: The ability to quickly reflect user's feedback allowed ASN to fully tailor the solution to adapt each process to the specific needs of each user. User-friendly web and mobile interfaces allowed for a fast roll-out of the solution
  and ensured high end-user adoption rates.